Living a long and happy life in spite of having ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease

RickSpringfield

Sleep is sometimes hard to come by when you have a serious illness, or even when you don’t. Not getting enough rest can lead to all sorts of new and unwanted problems on top of what you are already dealing with. I am all for alternative medicine, and by that I mean not medication, but herbs or vitamins, aromatherapy, etc… But life is short. If you have a serious illness, chances are, you already have way too many things on your plate. Sometimes I think it’s faster and easier to just get a prescription. Whether it’s pain that’s keeping you awake at night, and you need a pain pill, or just the inability to sleep and you need a sleeping pill, talk to your doctor and get some rest. I personally take both. But this is a blog , and I am not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV. Although, I have met and talked with Rick Springfield several times, and he played a neurosurgeon on General Hospital for years…so that should count for something, right? Dr Noah Drake

I take the lowest dosage of the sleeping pill, Ambien, and I cut them in half. I end up taking such a small dose, by the time I cut that tiny pill in half, I sometimes wonder if it really helps that much, or if I just think it does. So when my husband found a half of an Ambien on the floor the other night, just after I had taken my evenings pills, I wondered if and when I may have missed a dose. I was pretty sure I had taken one that night, mixed in with a couple of other small pills. I have developed a habit of checking which pills I am given before I swallow them, by feeling them with my tongue. When you can’t pick up a pill yourself and rely on someone else to do it for you, if they make a mistake you will be wishing you had double checked it beforehand. I can identify probably close to twenty pills just by the way they feel in my mouth. That little trick has kept me from taking the wrong pill more than a few times over the years. I started checking them years ago, after I had asked my daughter to bring me an Imodium. Not really paying much attention to what she brought me, I took it and soon found out I had actually taken a Tylenol PM. Two pills that were packaged the same way and looked similar, but believe me, if you need an Imodium, you do NOT want a Tylenol PM!

Back to the Ambien… I slept fine that night. Thinking that I must have missed a dose at some point but hadn’t had any problems sleeping, I decided to skip the Ambien the next night. Around 3:30 a.m., I began to rethink my decision. By 4:30 a.m., I had decided that I didn’t care if I took a half of a sleeping pill every night for the rest of my life. I have too much else going on to have to worry about not sleeping. So, I took my half a pill and got my Zzz’s.

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